Turkish Hackers Deface Popular Websites

Below:

Next story in Security

A group of Turkish hackers defaced several popular websites
Sunday (Sept. 4), including The Telegraph, The Register, Vodafone
and National Geographic.

Visitors to these sites, as well as Acer, UPS and Betfair.com,
were redirected to a Web page where, below a picture of a red
dragon, read "TurkGuvenligi, Gel Babana. HACKED. H4ck1n9 is not a
cr1m3."

"Guvenligi" is Turkish for "Security," and "Gel Babana"
translates to "Come to Papa," the security firm Sophos
reported.

The message continued: "4 Sept. We TurkGuvenligi declare this day
as World Hackers Day — Have Fun ;) h4ck y0u."

Unlike traditional website hacks, like LulzSec's takedown of the
CIA website in June, TurkGuvenligi's did not breach the
websites themselves, but instead manipulated the Domain Name
System (DNS) records for each of its targets.

As Sophos' senior technology consultant explained, "DNS records
work like a telephone book, converting human-readable website
names like nakedsecurity.sophos.com into a sequence of numbers
understandable by the Internet. What seems to have happened is
that someone changed the lookup, so when you entered
telegraph.co.uk or theregister.co.uk into your browser, you were
instead taken to a website that wasn't under the control of those
websites."

The Register issued a
statement on the hack, explaining that it appears no attempt
was made to penetrate its servers, but added that as a precaution
it shut down access to any Web services requiring a password.
Those services have now been restored.

Yesterday's victims were not TurkGuvenligi's first. The group has
performed similar DNS attacks on more than 100 websites,
including Interpol, HSBC, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Peugeot and
several security companies including F-Secure, Kaspersky Lab and
Secunia.

Despite its high-profile targets, it appears TurkGuvenligi is not
operating with malicious intent or even a hacktivist agenda.
According to a brief email
interview between The Guardian and the group, TurkGuvenligi
defaced its targets' websites simply for the fun and the
challenge of it.